his little authority,
and to relish it like a glass of wine, that is _impayable_. Sometimes,
when I see one of these little kings strutting over one of his
victories--wholly illegal, perhaps, and certain to be reversed to his
shame if his superiors ever heard of it--I could weep. The strange thing
is that they _have nothing else_. I auscultate them in vain; no real
sense of duty, no real comprehension, no real attempt to comprehend, no
wish for information--you cannot offend one of them more bitterly than
by offering information, though it is certain that you have _more_, and
obvious that you have _other_, information than they have; and talking
of policy, they could not play a better stroke than by listening to you,
and it need by no means influence their action. _Tenez_, you know what a
French post office or railway official is? That is the diplomatic card
to the life. Dickens is not in it; caricature fails.

All this keeps me from my work, and gives me the unpleasant side of the
world. When your letters are disbelieved it makes you angry, and that
is rot; and I wish I could keep out of it with all my soul. But I have
just got into it again, and farewell peace!

My work goes along but slowly. I have got to a crossing place, I
suppose; the present book, _St. Ives_, is nothing; it is in no style in
particular, a tissue of adventures, the central character not very well
done, no philosophic pith under the yarn; and, in short, if people will
read it, that's all I ask; and if they won't, damn them! I like doing it
though; and if you ask me why! After that I am on _Weir of Hermiston_
and _Heathercat_, two Scotch stories, which will either be something
different, or I shall have failed. The first is generally designed, and
is a private story of two or three characters in a very grim vein. The
second--alas! the thought--is an attempt at a real historical novel, to
present a whole field of time; the race--our own race--the west land and
Clydesdale blue bonnets, under the influence of their last trial, when
they got to a pitch of organisation in madness that no other peasantry
has ever made an offer at. I was going to call it _The Killing Time_,
but this man Crockett has forestalled me in that. Well, it'll be a big
smash if I fail in it; but a gallant attempt. All my weary reading as a
boy, which you remember well enough, will come to bear on it; and if my
mind will keep up to the point it was in a while back, perhaps I can
p